Causeway: A Passage From Innocence

by Linden McIntyre

  I just stared back, expecting a blast for stealing bottles he considered to be his. Lots of older people gather bottles. After a dance in the school, I have to get up at dawn to get the bottles that are littering the school grounds before Mrs. Lew gets at them. She also lives close to the school and likes to cut me out of the bottle business every chance she gets. I didn’t think there was much danger that she’d get up to the construction camp, but now this old guy was looking at me as if he was about to pounce.

  We just stared at each other.

  Then he said: “You take the beer bottles.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question, and I immediately noticed the strange accent. The only accents I’ve ever heard are the French, and Uncle Joe’s Irish, and the Malones from the South Shore.

  I didn’t know how to answer, but the dog trotted over and started sniffing at his pant leg.

  He reached down and scratched the dog behind the ears.

  “Your dog?”

  This was a question.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He squatted down and took the dog’s head in both his hands and seemed to be studying his face. Then, to my astonishment, he opened the dog’s mouth and looked in.

  “This is a good dog,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “His name is Skipper.”

  “Skipper,” he repeated, and then laughed.

  “You know he is a good dog,” he explained, “by black in dog’s mouth. Come here. Look.”

  He opened the dog’s jaws again, and I was amazed by the way the dog just went along with it. I don’t think I’d ever looked in there before. The tongue was pink and the teeth yellowing, and he had foul breath. But sure enough, the roof of Skipper’s mouth was black, which means that he is quality. And to think that Uncle Francis came that close to shooting him!

  “What’s your name?” Old John asked.

  “Linden,” I told him, resisting the urge to make up a new one on the spot.

  “Linden,” he said. “Good name. Linden tree.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “In Berlin,” he said. “Is a big street. Unter den Linden.”

  I didn’t know that and, spoken the way he said it, the name suddenly sounded okay.

  “Are you a German?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied, half laughing. “Not a German.”

  “What are you then?” I asked.

  “You ever hear of Hungary?”

  Something stirred in the memory. Something from the newspapers. Communists. Cardinal Mindszenty. Prison.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I don’t know where it is.”

  “Is in Europe,” he said.

  “Is it near Germany?”

  “All Europe is near Germany. This is the problem.”

  We just stared at each other for a while, and I thought his face was friendly and his eyes were kind.

  “You come Saturday,” he said. “I tell you about Hungary. And I save bottles for you. Friday night lots of beer drinking.”

  He laughed.

  “My name is John,” he said.

  Then he walked away.

  The main camp is a large building for the workers. There is also a smaller one for their bosses. And a cookhouse where everybody eats. Walking by the cookhouse in the evening, the smells of baking and of meat cooking make your mouth water. Every evening smells like fresh bread and sizzling pork chops, and it occurred to me that, maybe, living away from home and eating in a place like that can’t be so bad after all. Pork chops every night, and somebody to pick up after you in a bunkhouse. At home, pork chops are special. Even the dog looks envious.

  That evening, after meeting Old John for the first time, I asked my mother about Hungary.

  “It’s behind the Iron Curtain,” she said.

  “The Iron Curtain? Like the cofferdam?”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “It’s what they call Communism,” she said. “An iron curtain that has divided the world in two. It’s a metaphor.”

  “A what?”

  Saturday mornings, true to his word, Old John would have boxes of empty beer bottles neatly stored for me. And after we got to know each other better, he’d take me to the cookhouse, where we’d have mugs of tea and he’d ask me questions about school and home and the village and my plans for after I grow up.

  I lied and said I wasn’t certain. Maybe I’d be a miner like my father.

  He seemed impressed that my father was a miner.

  “Mining is hard work,” he said. Maybe I should stay in school. Get a job where I could wear a shirt and tie. Not end up like him—an old man in a strange place.

  But when I’d ask him questions about himself and Hungary, he’d just look away and become quiet.

  Once he said: “Hungary is a very sad place. Very sad. Bad people running Hungary.”

  “Communists,” I volunteered.

  “Yes,” he said. “You know about Communists?”

  “From the paper,” I said.

  “Canadians very lucky people,” he said. “No Communists here.”

  I found a book that told me that Hungary was once part of one of the strongest empires in the world, but that, since the end of World War Two, the Communists have taken over and started persecuting anyone who doesn’t agree with them, including priests and bishops and even a cardinal.

  I get books from a library in the basement of the church in town. The only books in school are the ones we use for our lessons—history, English, math, etc. There are no books that you’d want to read for fun. But the church library has lots of books for all ages and, ever since Miss Christie, I’ve been reading books by Pearl S. Buck, who writes about China.

  And now that I know a Hungarian, I look for books about Hungary and Communism, and I follow the news about Eastern Europe, and I’m beginning to realize how dangerous and interesting the world really is. And I can hardly wait to be a part of it.

  My father seems happy to be home, finally working in his own place after years of travelling around the country. I think my father got his job here without any help from politicians. But I know he needed help, and whenever he’s talking about his truck he says it belongs to him and the banker. My Aunt Veronica, however, believes in the power of politicians more than ever. It seems a lawyer helped her with her water problem, but I got the impression, overhearing conversations in the kitchen, that important politicians, including Mr. Angus Waye, who is the mayor of Port Hawkesbury, helped her too. They put pressure on the right people, and the well driller eventually left her alone and stopped pestering her for money she doesn’t have.

  Of course, she still doesn’t have water either. Even politicians can’t put water where there isn’t any.

  Everybody was saying Angus L. should be here to see the last load dumped and the causeway connected to the island. Or isn’t it a shame that the man who actually dumped the first load of fill into the strait to start the causeway project can’t be here to see his dream fulfilled. And how tragic it is that Angus L. is dead.

  It would have been shocking even if there had been a warning or if he’d been a hundred years old. But nobody expected it, and he was only sixty-four, which is young for a premier. He worked himself to death, they say. After helping run the country during the war, he went back to being Nova Scotia’s premier, and the causeway was one of his priorities. All the work he did to get the causeway started helped to bring him down.

  Even our house was full of sorrow at the news.

  My aunt, who follows the news more carefully than most people, was saying he caught a cold during a trip to Scotland in November 1953 and never got over it. It was as though she was talking about a member of the family. Then right after Scotland he goes to Edmonton, Alberta, to make a speech. Then he shuffles the Cabinet and gives himself the hardest jobs. Goes to the hospital Sunday night, April 11, and even takes his work with him—estimates for the Department of Highways and Public Works, whatever they are.

  Just rest in ho
spital for a few days, they said. Then the announcement Tuesday morning—he’s dead. Worn out, my aunt said. And now he’s replaced by that Harold Connolly—which wasn’t entirely bad, except that there was no way the Halifax Grits were going to leave him in the job.

  It was the biggest thing since the coronation. They even had his funeral on the radio. The Halifax paper said that 85,000 people lined up at the legislature to pay their respects to his dead body. And that there were 100,000 people along the streets watching the funeral procession.

  He was as important as the Queen, but the archbishop of Halifax talked about how Angus L. was once “a small boy from a small Cape Breton village, attending the smallest of schools.” He became a great man, anyway, and now “we draw a veil over that life so useful, so beloved, so serviceable, so fit to inspire many another boy in the small villages of Canada.”

  From where I was listening to the funeral, I could look out a window. The trucks were still crawling along the face of the cape, trundling out to the end of the causeway that he dreamed of and made happen. Racing to complete the fulfillment of his dream and not even pausing to lament his death—which is probably what he’d have wanted.

  We could hear the funeral from the radio on the top of the fridge. My father was listening, squinting through the smoke of his cigarette. I was wondering what he thought about those words—the small boy in the small Cape Breton village. And what life might have been like if he’d grown up in a village or a town, never mind a city. Or if there had been a doctor or a school.

  When it was over he got up and went out, and we could hear the truck starting.

  From the beginning, Billy Malone wanted to know everything there is to know about the village. I told him as much as I could, about the cove and the old coal piers, and how the place once had more than a dozen stores and places where men could drink liquor until they passed out. There used to be a big dance hall, just across from where Sylvia and Darlene Reynolds live with their parents, William and Anita. But it burned down because some kids were playing with matches.

  I told him about all the older people. How Harry and Rannie were harmless, but we’re supposed to keep an eye on Danny Black Dan. How Danny MacIntosh had great war stories when he was drinking with the other veterans and, if you were quiet, you could sneak in and listen. How John MacDougall was shot between the eyes in World War Two and still survived. And how Joe Larter had been to Korea and brought a special scarf back for Jean.

  He wanted to know about people like Don Riley, who often stays at Jackie Nicholson’s place, but I don’t know much about Riley, who doesn’t seem to have any real connections here. Unlike everybody else, he doesn’t seem to have any relatives. He’s always been around, and everybody knows him because he’s a great step dancer. You step dance indoors to fiddle music, but sometimes you’ll even see Don Riley dancing on the road while somebody chants the music for him. De-diddle-di-de-diddle-dum, and Riley pounding the road as if there was a real fiddle player there and hardwood underneath his feet.

  Billy doesn’t understand why people here like fiddle music and says it all sounds the same to him. Or why people enjoy Riley dancing like the black minstrels we see in the movies.

  I think his favourite old person here is Jimmy Cameron, who looks like an elf and always has a crooked pipe in his mouth. Jimmy has a brain a little bit like Martin Angus, because he can remember, word for word, long stories and poems that he learned when he went to school ages ago.

  Once Jimmy was working with a gang, clearing rocks off the Victoria Line, and I asked him to recite “Hiawatha” for us. And he did. Billy Malone’s big eyes just got bigger and bigger as Jimmy Cameron stood there, leaning on the handle of his shovel, looking off in the distance as if he could actually see the Indians and the woods and the water. And I told Billy afterwards that, next time, we’d get Jimmy to recite his best story, about a skater who is being chased by wolves. But we didn’t have time that day because the story goes on and on. And Jimmy was, after all, getting paid sixty cents an hour by the government for working on the road.

  And I showed Billy all the best places for gathering beer bottles. Of course, the best place of all is the construction camp where Old John saves the bottles for us.

  Billy’s father works for T.C. Gorman and seems to know a little bit about Old John. Mr. Malone says Old John has a family back in Hungary and is always trying to get them into Canada and away from the Communists.

  I asked Mr. Malone what were his chances, and he said Old John was optimistic. Things seemed to be improving in Hungary since old Joe Stalin croaked.

  But Joe Stalin isn’t a Hungarian, I pointed out. What does he have to do with Old John’s family? Mr. Malone just laughed.

  I thought I’d ask Old John but decided to wait until he wants to tell me himself.

  The papers seem to think that even though Joe Stalin is gone, the Communists, either in Russia or in China, will start the next world war.

  Grandma Donohue doesn’t agree. She’s convinced that it will be a man named Nasser and that the war will start in the Holy Land. And that is where I plan to be a missionary some day.

  Easter felt different this year, probably because of Angus L. dying just before Good Friday. A lot of people think that was significant. People were mentioning that he was almost like a saint, and that the causeway should be named after him.

  But it seems, when he was still alive, he had vetoed that idea, and nobody wanted to go against his wishes after he was dead.

  The Angus L. Macdonald Causeway sounded good enough to me, but his preference was “The Road to the Isles”—the name of one of his favourite bagpipe tunes. And that is probably what they’ll name it.

  Angus L. was fond of Scottish music. He was always making references to Scottish history in his speeches, and the papers often referred to his Gaelic, as if it made him special in some way. My father doesn’t think that Gaelic makes anybody special, but, as is the case with so many things I ask him, he usually answers questions with another question or a joke.

  “How come I can’t speak Gaelic?”

  “Where would Gaelic get you?”

  Or, “Where did we come from in Scotland?”

  “Uist, I think.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You tell me.”

  One of the things Angus L. Macdonald did when he was alive was to hire a man from Scotland to act as a special Gaelic adviser to the government. The adviser’s name is Major Calum Iain Norman MacLeod. You hear him on the radio some evenings giving Gaelic lessons.

  My father will get up close to the radio, listening.

  “Caite bheil bean an tighe?” Major MacLeod will say carefully. And some young girl will repeat it after him. Then he’ll say what it means: “Where is the lady of the house?”

  And my father will smile and say something like “Tha i anns an tigh bheag,” which means “She’s in the toilet.”

  Then he goes away, shaking his head, as if “Where’s the lady of the house” is the most useless question anybody could ask in any language.

  One that I remembered was “Cuir a mach an cu,” which means “Put the dog out.”

  My father said: “Well, that’s the first useful thing I’ve heard out of the Major since he started.” You could see Skipper nervously looking out from under the stove, which is where he sleeps when he’s in the house.

  The Major also plays pipe music, but my father likes only certain tunes on the bagpipes. But when the fiddle music comes on, everybody has to stop talking, and if it’s somebody that he knows, like Dan Rory MacDonald, or Little Jack, or Dan Hughie MacEachern, or Angus Chisholm, he’ll practically have his ear inside the radio.

  I’m not sure what is so special about the fiddle music. I agree with Billy Malone. It all sounds the same to me. At least the bagpipe music makes you feel like doing something, crying or killing. My father says that when I’m a little older, the fiddle will make me feel like dancing. But then I think of Don Riley step dancing to pret
end fiddle music on the side of the road—and people laughing at him.

  My parents’ favourite thing on the radio is a program called Fun at Five. The man in charge of Fun at Five is called the Old Timer, and he’s always making comments about his likes and dislikes. For instance, there’s a song he hates: “Good Night, Irene.” And every time they start to play it on his program, he stops it after the first few notes and says, “Somebody give me my hammer”—and he proceeds to smash the record right there. You can hear it break and the pieces going into the trash can.

  Then, maybe three nights later, “Good Night, Irene” will start again, and the Old Timer will smash it again. You wonder why they keep trying to play it if he’s only going to smash it. Records cost money.

  Mostly he plays fiddle tunes and cowboy songs by Wilf Carter and Hank Snow, who are famous all over Canada and the United States, but who grew up in small villages in Nova Scotia. My favourites are Eddy Arnold and, of course, Roy Rogers, who, besides being a cowboy and gunfighter, also sings songs on the radio.

  The interesting thing to me is that everybody knows that the Old Timer is really a politician named J. Clyde Nunn and that he’s a Grit and that, even though he lives over on the mainland, in Antigonish, and works for the Antigonish radio station, he represents Inverness County in the provincial legislature.

  This I can’t quite understand—being from the mainland and representing a place in Cape Breton.

  My father says it wouldn’t matter if J. Clyde Nunn was from Mars for all the good that any politician does.

  But my mother and my Aunt Veronica and my Grandmother Donohue love the Old Timer on the radio, even though they can’t stand Clyde Nunn in politics.